What meaning exists, I wonder, in the space where no story is written? A week before we boarded the plane in Newark I took a final exam in a Spanish literature class, choosing to write on the following lines from Lorca’s “El romance del emplazado”:

Hombres bajaban la calle
para ver al emplazado,
que fijaba sobre el muro
su soledad con descanso.
Y la sábana impecable,
de duro acento romano,
daba equilibrio a la muerte
con las rectas de sus paños.

Then I saw Guernica for myself at Reina Sofía in Madrid, and looking through that war-shattered window, I wished I could have written differently. The point being that there is no such balance. The poem, the painting, do not matter. There is no story, no religion, no art, in which unmitigated violence makes sense. And so we tell ourselves lies in order to go on living.